Digital educational content design for the firefighting profession

Firefighting is known around the world as a challenging, demanding, and respected profession. Firefighters are dedicated professionals, known for their courage and willing to risk everything to save lives. They tackle many incidents, including fires, search and rescue, floods, flooding, traffic accidents, animal rescue and suicide attempts. Fire departments operating at the local level are located in every district of our country. Responding to these challenging incidents requires serious training and experience. In the last decade, the frequency and severity of disasters have made the training requirements of the firefighting profession more important. In this context, firefighting and civil defence programs are provided in Vocational Schools and high schools. There are also daily, weekly, monthly, and annual training programs in the firefighting profession. These programs usually include theoretical and practical trainings lasting 1-2 hours. A significant part of the training focuses on the use of vehicles and equipment. This equipment is critical for fire and rescue personnel. The aim of our work is to digitize this equipment so that training can be done anywhere and under any conditions. The training of equipment is often costly and can break down due to the frequency of use. Theoretical training is given in fire schools, but there is a lack of practical training. This may cause staff to forget or experience conflict under stress. For these reasons, it is important that online and visual training materials are readily available for fire department personnel. This study focuses on the lifting cushions, jump bed, landing and safety device, fresh air breathing apparatus, seismic acoustic listening device and vehicle mounted dry chemical powder tank equipment in the inventory of Ankara Fire Department, which are frequently used in the fire brigade and search and rescue sector and have complex structures. Scenarios were created in a short and brief manner in a sequential order regarding the introduction, installation, and use of the parts of the aforementioned equipment. Adhering to the created scenario and sequence, the equipment was first transferred to the digital environment by video recording method, and a digital educational content was created by blending it with external voiceover method and moving visual content. With this study, it is aimed to save a significant amount of time in the training of firefighters, to provide young people studying in fire schools with more visual information about the equipment, to refresh the memories of equipment users at the scene and to use technology more actively in the firefighting sector. Keywords: Firefighting, vocational training, educational content design, visual education